THE GRAPHIC BOOK OF the Year is incontestably Alison Bechdel’s unflinching, multilayered memoir of growing up in small-town Pennsylvania, Fun Home (Cape, £12.99/offer £11.99).

Four months after Bechdel comes out as gay to her parents, her father, the manager of a funeral home business, dies in a road accident. Slowly, it comes to light that he was a closeted gay man. A complex love-letter not only to her father but also to books and reading, Fun Home is luminescent with wit, lyrical prose, intelligence, honesty and emotional truth.

An even heavier burden of unbearable truth lies at the centre of Bernice Eisenstein’s memoir I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (Picador, £14.99/£13.49). Born in Canada to parents who survived Auschwitz and migrated to the New World, Eisenstein tries to understand and articulate the shadows of someone else’s past — the unimaginable horrors and losses witnessed by her parents.

Such experiences are not easily transferable but she tries to inhabit the shadows with heroic empathy; the straining makes for an original memorialisation where the self must be constructed through a painstaking and painful piecing together of others’ histories.

Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Book One (£12.99/£11.99) — Drawn & Quarterly’s beautiful reissue of the strip created for the London Evening News in the 1950s — is an oasis of innocence. I cannot think of a more effective way to reverse the vanishings of adulthood than immersing oneself in these delightful tales of Moomin, Snufkin and Snork Maiden.

Renée French’s The Ticking (Top Shelf, £12.99/£11.99) is like nothing I have encountered before. A surreal, desolate, near-wordless book, dredged up from some shadowy recess of the mind, it tells the story of a deformed child brought up in isolation by his father on a remote island. It marries the world of David Lynch’s Eraserhead to the bleakness of Béla Tarr but its mysterious ending feels disturbingly redemptive. The pencil drawings are heart-stoppingly beautiful.

There is a suffocating amount of black in the manically crammed artwork of Max Andersson’s and Lars Sjunnesson’s Bosnian Flat Dog (Fantagraphics, £8.99/£8.54), as if to mirror the black, acid quality of their humour. They chart — via a cartoonists’ convention in Slovenia that turns into a nightmare involving ice-creams, grenade shells and the frozen corpse of President Tito — nothing less than the descent into the hell of Yugoslavia after its splintering.

Saturated with absurdist gallows humour and scathing political pessimism, this should stand alongside Joe Sacco’s graphic masterpieces on the Balkans, Safe Area Gorazde and The Fixer.

At first glance, Anders Nilsen’s Monologues for the Coming Plague (Fantagraphics, £11.99/£10.99) appears shot through with whimsy and aimlessness, so it is a pleasant surprise to discover that these stream-of-consciousness, (mostly) unrelated doodles accumulate the status of playful meditations, almost a Zen-like quality. At times, they are also very funny. The drawings are relaxed and informal, the production values top-notch.

For a wry sensibility and a keenly intelligent skew-whiff sense of humour, look at Tom Smith’s chronicle of his time in Japan as an English-language teacher in The Spider Spoke Nos 1 and 2 ($2 (£1.05) each, at usscatastrophe.com/store). Here is a cartoonist who not only knows how to draw but also how to write.

And so to the man whom posterity will remember as the greatest historian of the comics/graphic novel form in this country and certainly its most enthusiastic chronicler: Paul Gravett. His latest offering, co-written with Peter Stanbury and gorgeously produced by Aurum Press, complements their Graphic Novels: Stories to Change your Life issued last year.

The literary archaeology at the core of Great British Comics (£18.99/£16.99) takes your breath away. Beano, Dandy, Modesty Blaise, Judge Dredd and Dan Dare are still familiar but scores of others are rescued from oblivion: Leo Baxendale’s Tiddlers for Wham!, the magazine that he created in 1964; Sweeny Toddlers (about a terrorising baby); a pastiche of Indian sci-fi and curryhouse-menu prose called Rogan Gosh; The Happy Days, a chirpily narrated strip, about the experiences of a suburban family that ran for 13 years; the saga of Wulf the Briton, which started in Express Weekly in 1957. Dip into this treasure trove and you will come up with something amazing every time.

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